


Demons not sold separately

by kineticallyanywhere



Category: Dungeons and Daddies (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, ace writing allos, they kiss a few times but its mostly hugs and handholding and hella tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:28:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26586628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kineticallyanywhere/pseuds/kineticallyanywhere
Summary: (Written post-42, takes place post-Oakveil arc)Henry's druid powers are part of something called a Circle of Dreams, and with his memories coming back he's starting to figure out what that means. Specifically, he's figuring out what that means for being able to communicate between dimensions. (He gets to talk to his best friend and wife and he's a mess so he needed it Real Bad.)
Relationships: Henry Oak/Mercedes Oak-Garcia
Comments: 4
Kudos: 46





	Demons not sold separately

**Author's Note:**

> 42 gave me 6000 feelings and I needed to process them. And expand on the illustrious Mercedes Oak-Garcia, long may she reign.

Turns out Henry has dream magic. He’s been aware of it to some extent since they landed in Faerun—when did he learn this land was called Faerun?—but hasn’t felt the pressure to use it. Not like he has for the poison or the shifting or the vines, anyway. Pulling magic out of his suppressed memories has had a lot to do with urgency, and this magic is very specifically  _ not _ urgent. 

They’re on the way to another kid swap. Henry borrowed Darryl’s phone. Just enough time has passed on Earth that Mercedes is home. Henry gave her a list of crystals that he knows they have around the house — he’d always known, somehow, he’d been collecting for a reason — and told her how to set it up and waited until she’d started meditating before hanging up the phone. The exact time dilation between Earth and Faerun seems inconsistent, but they sync up while they use the phone and separate when they hang up. Assuming she meditates for even ten minutes on Earth, Henry should have more than a week’s worth of time to try and get this right. Even as a kid, he’d never done this across dimensions before.

He gets it on the first try.

This dream space looks nothing like his father’s. (When did he come to understand his father’s role in creating Willy Stampler’s purple dreamscape?) It’s still a little cliche, but it’s not an empty void. The dream is warm and the space around the grassy floor is blanketed by soft, glowing, clouds of vapor. 

He feels safe here. Even without a clear memory of designing this place, he knows that was the intention he’d had as a kid. If nothing else was allowed to belong to Hen, at least no one could take his dreams. The sense of safety is familiar now, but not from here. Not from any single place. He found this same feeling in a person, even when he didn’t know to be looking for it. 

So to make clumsy use of a magic he’s so out of practice with, to reach across dimensions in a way that dozens of published magicians (including his father) had deemed impossible, all he has to do is turn around. 

And Mercedes is there with him. 

The moment Henry lays eyes on her—his best friend, his stone foundation, his lioness, his favorite person across two dimensions, his wife—all he wants to do is fall into that long, slow, familiar, kiss. To pull and be pulled in and sink into their practiced comfort of each other. 

But he can't. 

His hands have already found the space below her ears, fingers in her hair, by the time his body gets the message. She's already reached her arms to their places around his neck to pull him down. The whole graceful motion turns into a clumsy dodge as Henry redirects so that his face lands at her neck. He moves his arms to simply hold her against him. She doesn't flinch, but he feels her confusion in the stumble from their subconscious pattern. 

He wants to say he's sorry, but he doesn't know how. He can't just kiss her with everything she doesn't know between them. He doesn't know how this has changed him, and neither does she, and it wouldn't be right to do any of this without talking first, no matter how sore his heart already is. He hopes he isn't crossing any lines to just mold himself into her arms like this. 

"Henry?" 

Why is he even thinking like this? How could he lose confidence in her? Since when has underestimating her ever proven useful? Why is he still so scared? 

It's like there's a phantom hanging over him now. It's always been there, but now it's stained in purple and he can clearly picture his father's disapproving face, like he's still fifteen and he hasn't given up and still thinks there must be  _ something  _ he can do to get that expression to change— 

" _Henry_."

Mercedes' strong hand squeezes the back of his neck. Henry realizes how tightly he's holding her. He tries to let go, but he's pretty sure he ends up holding her even tighter. It's embarrassing that even in a dream he can't stop the pathetic noise he makes. Even with all he remembers, Henry’s not sure if that speaks for or against his abilities. 

Then her grip loosens and her hand sifts gently through his hair and that’s all it takes for his tight grip to melt. He can’t bring himself to let her go, but he does pull himself back. Her hand stays in his hair, thumb moving softly through overgrown fuzz. He and the other dads have tried to keep their hair under control with knives and scissors, but they lost the scissors in the van and Henry hasn’t looked in a mirror since Balls Deep. 

He knows Mercedes looks just like she did the morning they left, but he can’t get his eyes to open. 

He inhales to say, “I’m sorry,” but she beats him there. 

“Sit with me,” she says. 

Henry nods and croaks out an, “Okay.” 

They sit with their legs tangled together, face to face, like they did when they were barely adults and trying to read the same book at the same time. When they sat so close their knees overlapped and it was the most natural position to have their heads bumping each other to get a good look at the book on their laps. There’s no book this time, but their hands still idly fill the space. 

First thing's first. She asks, "The kids?" 

For that Henry always has his voice. "They're safe. They're safe, we found them, we're gonna get them home, they're gonna be okay." Starting there drains some of the nervous tension out of him. Lark and Sparrow are safe and they're going to make it home. That's what matters, in the end. 

Her motherly fierceness cools into warm concern, aimed directly at him. "And what about you, love?" 

That knot of tension curls right back up in Henry's chest. He exhales, shakey with exhaustion, and finds his whole body curling with it until his head is resting on her knee. Her hand finds his shoulder and rubs circles down his back. 

“Sweetheart?” 

The naked concern in her voice has him sniffling himself up to a straight back. “I’m okay,” he lies. “I  _ will _ be,” he corrects. 

She nods, really taking in his face now. He can’t bring himself to be self-conscious, though he wonders just how deep his tan has set in or if he’s developed new wrinkles she’s searching for the cause of in his eyes. “How long have you been gone?”

"Two months? I think?" He roughly sniffs back a sob. Two months of time becoming a numb passing as they adjusted to their situation but now feels brutally real here, in front of Mercedes who hasn't even passed an afternoon. "Travel time is hard to keep track of, and the suns don't move the same here so it's hard to… I'm not sure exactly how days translate between worlds, much less months or years, I…" 

Henry's ramble gets more stilted as the weight of the time dilation hits him. Hits  _ Henry _ specifically. 

"I don't know how old I am," he says, suddenly dazed. 

Mercedes chuckles a bit. "Well… yeah, but we've been working off a pretty solid guess for twenty years," she says. Which is true, Henry could only estimate within a year of his age when he landed on Earth and they had to pick a birthday for him because none of the month names his brain generated were actual months. 

Except they  _ are _ months and their names are slipping back to him now and  _ jeez louise Henry might know his actual birthday now_. But it's still not translating to earth years at _all_. _ Do _ their planets have concurrent year cycles? What if Faerun years are shorter? Or longer? Do Faerun humans even age at the same rate? And Henry's not even full-blooded human, he's a quarter  _ immortal elf _ what does that do to his body? Is that compatible? He's never had his blood tested—

"Earth calling Henry," Mercedes sing-songs.

Henry’s jaw feels stiff. He doesn’t usually have any trouble talking for minutes on end, but now it’s like he’s sifting through a tangle of string to pull his thoughts out of his head and down into his mouth. 

"I'm not… I'm not what I thought I was," he manages. 

Mercedes looks at him seriously but with no shortage of her endless empathy, "Henry, whatever you had to do—"

"No, not like that," he interjects. Though he reconsiders. "Well, a bit like that. But, I mean… I'm not… well I  _ am  _ human, but there's also, like, this—and then--" How does he even begin to cover  _ the creature_. He runs his hands over his face, inadvertently squeezing more water out of his eyes. "Mercedes, it's _ so much_." 

Mercedes takes his hands back into hers. She wipes his tears with her sleeve while he makes the grossest, snottiest, sniffle. 

"Start closer to the surface, then," she tells him. (They used to say "start from the bottom," but the complications involved the chemistry of igneous rocks at the core of the earth would always lead him off on a tangent, and so they switched to sedimentary.) "What's happened since you last called? Carol said you were on your way to get the boys." 

Ravenloft feels like an eternity ago. Neverwinter before that even longer, but Henry doesn't let himself think that far back. Just touching the memory of Mercedes' letter makes his hands shake. 

Her warm, living, hands give his a tight squeeze. 

Ravenloft. The planning, the army, the bridge, the talk, Ron pulling off that first hood. 

"My dad is here," Henry says, still half caught in that memory of the hood falling back and his father's look of surprise. His blood runs cold all over again. 

"Your  _ dad?_" Mercedes says with shock echoing his own. "How did he get there?" 

Henry's chest puffs out a laugh and his lips twitch morosely upward. He'd asked that so many times, had been  _ so _ confused, but it was the simplest answer out of all of them. 

"He never left." 

Henry expects confusion. He expects disbelief or denial or a million more questions asking him to elaborate on something that, even by their standards, sounds absolutely out of this world. Because it is. Well, out of  _ her _ world. 

Instead, her hands are suddenly clamped on either side of his face, moving him to look her directly in the eyes (which are  _ way _ better than the sunrise, what has he been  _ thinking? _ ) In absolute seriousness--just like the time after her c-section when the doctors were still cleaning the twins for a few more seconds and Henry was the one to report why their baby’s crying was happening in stereo--she says, “Henry. Are you an alien?”

Henry is already a terrible liar. And, even if he wanted to lie about this, it has been scientifically proven that he is completely incapable of it while making eye contact with Mercedes Oak-Garcia. So, immediately, out of his mouth tumbles, “About 75% yes, give or take depending on which genetics were inherit-- _ mmf!_” 

She’s kissing him on the mouth. Henry’s brain ceases to function for about thirty seconds. Somehow reality clicks for both of them at the same time but in different ways. They pop apart and speak at the same time. 

Mercedes says, “I’m sorry, I should have checked that that was okay.” 

And Henry says, “Mercedes, I was raised as the prince of a druid cult--” When he hears her he shifts to, “I mean, I’m not objecting to it-- _ mm._” 

And they lose another thirty seconds. 

Henry has to turn a quick break for air into a gentle but firm push back. “ _ Leona_.” 

“Sorry,” Mercedes gasps, but she’s giggling. “Sorry. This is serious” 

Henry needs to talk about this  _ seriously_, but now he’s smiling, too. “It is,” he tells her. Though he’s trying to figure out why, again. Sometimes she’s totally unpredictable and he gets caught up in it. 

Unpredictable… chaotic… shit. 

The knot in his gut is back. 

His rapid descent back down the rabbit hole must show on his face. Mercedes takes his hands again. She recaps, "Okay. So, you're in your original home dimension, you've got alien parents, and your dad is a druidic cult leader."

"And half-elf," Henry adds absently. 

"And I  _ will _ contain how hot that makes you until you're back," Mercedes promises. 

"But it's not just that, there's this…" How does he even explain what he saw? He had to try when explaining it to Darryl and Glenn, but that hadn't exactly been smooth. Start on the surface. The surface is simple. "My grandmother was from Earth." 

"Yeah?" 

He thinks of the Oak Ridge building and the dial phones and the film. "Yeah," he says with more certainty. 

"How did she get to your world?" 

"It's not my--" Henry cuts himself off, befuddled by his own sudden defensiveness. It's not this world that he hates, though not much good has happened to him in it. Is it wrong to feel connected to a place of which his memories are still healing? I s it wrong to feel disconnected from the place where he was raised and built the foundation of his personhood, even if he'd misplaced that for so long? He doesn't even know, it's all just so confusing. 

He hates this so much. The knot inside him feels like a physical tangle, scribbling around in his ribcage and reaching up into his ears and brain like static. It's a familiar feeling that he doesn't know how to stop and he hates that even more. 

Mercedes squeezes his hands. "How did she end up in  _ that _ world?" Mercedes rephrases. She doesn't draw any further attention to the detail, just lets the moment pass for Henry to continue. 

He loves her  _ so much.  _

"She got caught up in something," Henry says. "There was… some sort of monster. Whatever it was— _ is_, it…" He remembers that static on her wrist. "It infected her. When it got banished from earth, she did, too. The infection got passed to my dad, and…" 

He's quiet for too long. Mercedes waits patiently, though she's certainly figured out what the next step in that sequence is. But he has to say it. It's real, and it's true and Henry has to  _ say _ it. He won't live in a relationship that doesn't have clear and explicit consent, he has to  _ say it.  _ If he just looked her in the eye it would all come out, but he can't bring himself to. Despite everything he's told the boys, he's not that strong. He doesn't know how not to feel ashamed. 

He's breathing like he's in the middle of a marathon. Every other breath he takes is the breath where he's going to  _ say it _ and then it isn't. Because it's not just the step after his dad, it's the step that comes after  _ that_. 

But she has to  _ know_. 

His hands are shaking and his knuckles are white. Surely he's hurting her, but her thumb just does gentle circles. 

"It's okay," she whispers. 

_ He loves her so much.  _

"He p— he passed it to—"  _ Me. He passed it to me. That deep feeling, that static, that non-sense, that indescribable  _ thing  _ that I've told you about deep in the night when the day was long and our bed was the safest place in the world. It's an unknowable monster that is deadly and destructive and unruly and sometimes it pulses inside my body like its own heartbeat and I cannot control it. I cannot control what it wants.  _ "And I—" 

Henry's almost completely breathless with panic. She  _ has  _ to have figured it out, she's so smart. But he has to  _ say it.  _ "I passed… parts of it—to—to—"  _ Lark and Sparrow. Our beautiful boys, our sons, who I prayed to anyone who would listen every day that I wouldn't burden like my father burdened me only to do  _ exactly— 

She hasn't let go of his hands. Henry's hunched low enough in his effort just to breath that she can lean forward and balance his head to her shoulder. She can press her lips to the back of his neck, and she does. 

"What's the monster like?" Mercedes asks. 

" _ I hate it_." The words burst out of him, suddenly as strong as the pressure pushing against and spilling out the corners of his eyes. " _ I hate it so much.  _ It never leaves me alone, and it's  _ mean_, and I can never get a grip on it but it's like it moves around my bones and next thing I know I—I'm _ shaking  _ and  _ shouting  _ and I want it to  _ stop.  _ But it  _ likes it.  _ It feels  _ good.  _ T-To  _ break _ something, to  _ scare  _ someone, and I  _ hate it_." 

Henry sits himself up again. It doesn't feel right to say these things and to touch her, but he can't stop. "I hate that I  _ like _ it. I hate that it  _ works_. That sometimes it’s like the only thing anyone will listen to! Even for my _ dad _ it’s the  _ only  _ thing he cares about other than  _ himself _ and I—”  _ hate him _ chokes and dies in his throat. “And now that it's not just some disgusting part of myself, it’s an actual  _ thing_. A _ thing _ that I gave to our kids! It's  _ terrible _ and I gave it to— I—" The spell of the outburst breaks and he sobs. "Mercedes, I…” 

He finally makes himself look her in the eye. She has to know. She has to know that this is true. 

“Mercedes, I’m so sorry.” 

All he can do is look at her. To wait, choking, for whatever her reaction to all of this is. Henry can’t even articulate his own reaction. He only knows that he’s a mess and he must look like a mess, but Mercedes looks like a dream. If she didn’t always look like that, he’d wonder if he was making up this entire encounter. He wonders if his imagination carries the image of her standing up and walking away for long enough, will it become real. 

But she just looks directly back at him. Not flinching or looking away in the slightest. Just taking him in the way she always does, as if she knows all of his secrets that even he doesn’t know. And still she’s here. He just told her that he passed a curse onto her kids, and she only looks sad. 

He’s made her so sad. He can’t keep his head up anymore, blurry gaze dropping to his lap. 

She finally sighs. “ _ León._” 

Use of the nickname makes Henry’s heart skip. She never uses that if she’s mad. Is she not mad? At all?

“I know my boys,” she says. 

Does she not believe him? Does she not think this is true?

Her hand comes up under his chin to lift his head. He tries to blink his blurry sight away, but apparently it’s his glasses that are fighting the tears. She pulls them from his face and he’s surprised to see her clearly. Apparently Dream Henry has better sight with or without them. 

“And I know  _ you_,” she continues. “There is no part of you—or Lark, or Sparrow—that I don’t already know.” Henry opens his mouth to disagree, but she doesn’t have it. “I don’t care what new names you learn for your species, or your blood type, or your anger.” 

“It’s not just my—” 

She bulldozes right over him. “When I married you, I married  _ all _ of you. Even the parts I didn’t know yet.”

Henry finally manages an interjection, “ _ I _ don’t even know me.”

“Well that sucks for you,” she replies without hesitation. “Because for the last twenty years the magic man with the monster bones has made me the happiest woman across two planets. And I’ll be damned before I let him stop.” 

Henry’s heart pushes right up his throat and out his eyes again. This time it doesn’t hurt so much. A short, hiccuped, noise comes out that feels like a laugh. 

Her hand holding his chin moves to cup his cheek. “I just… I just regret that I…” No, she’s sad still, he hates that. “I’m your partner, I should have been here with you for this.” 

Henry puts his own hand over hers, feeling the texture of her wedding ring on his palm. “Amor…” He’s wanted her here with him for  _ weeks_, in every moment he wasn’t weighing how dangerous this place would be for her. Even in those dangerous moments when he shouldn’t want her here, he wants her here. 

“We knew— Well,  _ I _ knew this had to be coming someday. You running into your blank spaces. But all my plans involved me  _ being there_. If I could just get to— “ 

Henry is struck like lightning with the image of the woman in front of him wrapped in bandages, falling to the floor with a final exhale—

He suddenly pulls her hand from his face so he can clap his other hand around it. She sits in confusion, and Henry waits for himself, with bated breath, to say something. To explain that. To tell her not to come. But it doesn’t matter what he says, she’ll find her way. She always will. 

But maybe, for now, she already has. “You’re already right here,” he says (looking at their hands.) 

Her free hand places itself on top of his. When he looks back up at her, she’s smiling. Henry smiles, too. He knows they’ve been here for a while, but it feels like no time has passed at all and she’s already made him feel lighter than he has in days. Even before going back to Oakveil. 

(The static, the thing, is still there; but a tickle, not a buzz.) 

Mercedes tilts her head to the side. “Can I kiss you?” she asks. 

Henry doesn’t dare move his hands, so wipes some of the water from his face with his shoulder. “Yes, please,” he says. 

Mercedes gives Henry the most delicate yet casually clumsy smooth on the lips. There’s a silly “ _ mmmwah_,” sound and everything. 

Henry is still leaning forward when she pulls away, his dry eyes unwilling to open. “Can we actually do that, but like a lot of it?”

He hears Mercedes inhale to speak. And then her jaw clicks shut. And then she asks, “How close to the boys are you sleeping?”

Henry has to pause to remember where he fell asleep. Right, an inn. His neck loses all tension, dropping his head, when he remembers the pertinent detail. “We’re sharing a bed.” 

In tandem they whisper, “Gosh darn it.” 

Henry is going to marry this woman— wait he already did that. Shoot. Is there some sort of Faerun marriage ritual that’s different? Maybe with his mother’s religion? Maybe they can get married again. Just to make it super official. Legal across all appropriate spaces. 

“Hey, Henry?”

Henry looks back up at her. “Hm?”

“Can I ask you questions?” she asks. There’s the faintest hesitation in her expression, which is a lot for her. 

“Gosh, uhm, yeah— I mean yes. Sure. Yes.” His toes fidget nervously, but the mountain’s worth of tension is gone. Apparently it was sitting on his tongue. “Of course. Yes. That’s probably the thing we should be doing, I mean, the more information you have from your side the better, and we should make the most of this. I’m honestly not sure how good I even am at this dreaming thing? I could frick up and break this at any moment. And there’s a whole childhood that I have chunks of now. Like, I mean, I think I have most of it? Or almost as much as most people do? Apparently I’m pretty good at theoretical magic and we’ve been filling our free time with that for years—” 

“Uh, huh,” is all Mercedes says. As Henry is rambling, she gets up on her knees to walk on them. She puts her hands on Henry’s shoulders and moves around until she’s behind him. 

“What are you—?” 

She plops back into the grass, crossing her arms around Henry’s neck, and she pulls him back with her. She’s got them right in that position where his head rests against her collar bone, and Henry can hug her bent leg up against his side. She rests her hands on his chest and plants a kiss into his hair. 

The sky here is pale blue-violet and dotted with stars. Her heartbeat is in his ear and her lungs breathe against his back.

“Tell me about the rocks,” she says. 

Henry gasps. Something from deep in his own mind splashes to the surface like cool water. “Well, to  _ start_. Earth rocks? The Earth rock cycle? Missing an entire step. Oh man, the fact that the planet even _ functions _ is a marvel no scientist on this world would wrap their head around. But don’t even get me started on crystalline structures I’ve been seeing around here, we’ll be on this all night…” 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> To be explicitly clear, I don't think Henry _likes_ getting angry. To draw from personal experience, it's like how I never go looking for skittles, but when I see them I eat them and then me and my genetically unfortunate teeth regret it after. Or being mentally MEH and then eating french fries or a bag of chips instead of an apple. 
> 
> But that would be several more thousand words to unpack when I just needed a good cry and some fluff. I assume, in the universe where this fic takes place, they get to all the rest later. For now it's snuggle and talk about rocks time. (Though depending on where canon decides to go I may need to provide for myself a good 100k words of Henry and the twins living with eldritch monster infections who knows) 
> 
> Rocks rock, my dudes.


End file.
